Information Structure

Abstract

The term information structure refers to the interface between the structure and meaning of linguistic utterances, on the one hand, and the interlocutors’ mental representations of information, discourse referents, and the overall universe of discourse, on the other. It is at this interfacing level of mental representation that linguistic rules and constraints on structure-building, interpretation, and processing interact with general cognitive processes involved in belief formation, such as memory, attention, pragmatic reasoning, and general inference processes. Information structure plays a crucial role in embedding linguistic utterances in ever-changing communicative settings and contexts, and it does so by imposing structure on the ways in which the information conveyed by an utterance is linguistically expressed. Information structure is responsible for an efficient information transfer between interlocutors, where information transfer consists in the updating of the interlocutors’ mental models of the world, and in the establishment of mutually shared knowledge bases (common grounds) through the exchange of linguistic utterances. A central observation is that linguistically coded information is structured in a specific way, such that it fits the context of the utterance and the knowledge states of the discourse participants. The information structure of linguistic utterances is typically reflected in their grammatical form. Linguistic marking of information structure facilitates information update and the actualization of belief states. For this reason, information structure, in the general sense, is often characterized in terms of information packaging or content management. In a more narrow sense, information structure refers to the concrete structural realization of information structure categories in linguistic utterances. The information structure categories themselves are taken to be universal, whereas their formal reflexes in the grammatical systems of natural languages are subject to cross-linguistic variation. The categories of information structure are organized along several independent but interacting dimensions, namely focus-background, topic-comment, and given-new. Some scholars assume an additional category of contrast, whereas others treat contrast as a pragmatic epiphenomenon, which is dependent on focus. Under certain conditions, information structure can directly affect the semantic interpretation of clauses. This is observed with focus-sensitive elements, which change the truth-conditions of sentences or trigger additional presuppositions. A further interpretive effect is often found with noncanonical sentence structures, which typically express a marked state of affairs from the perspective of information structure, and which frequently give rise to conversational implicatures. Finally, the interfacing nature of information structure between language and cognition makes it an important research topic in psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, language acquisition, and historical linguistics.